Engineering | Art | Technology

Initially motivated by my misfortune of not being able sign up to all the classes I wanted for my next semester at ITP I decided to create a script to constantly monitor the lists in case one of the classes I am interested opens.

For this purpose I am using node.js in combination with Selenium.

It started with me navigating through the inspector window and analyzing the network traffic as checked classes. I noticed an interesting request that lead to the entire NYU classes database. Every NYU student can login into their account and access this, but the reason why this link is interesting is because it's open to anyone, meaning that I don't have to use my credentials to make the requests.

The actual script is available on github (https://github.com/sebmorales/seleniumITPClassSearch).

At this point the script will run uninterruptedly on my local machine though a node server. Future steps is to have it run on my digitalocean server.

The script will check the classes I am interested in every two minutes, if for some miracle one of the classes is open, it will automatically login into my account and enroll me. Then send me an email.

So far it has worked for one of my classes! Two more to go :)

Once a class is detected as waitlisted or open, it will automatically login into my account and sign me up for the class.

The following images represent the process, a failed attempt of registering me for live web. Failed attempt because the class is currently closed.

The actual script is running with phantomjs, which is sort of an invisible browser, meaning that it has no actual GUI and it runs in the background.